I am mic'ing my amp and running it through Garageband, and it sounds really bad! Is it something to do with Garageband, or is my mic setup wrong?
My set up is as follows : Fender Tele --> Zoom G3XN --> Blackstar ID Core 10 --> Behringer Dynamic Mic (1 inch away from speaker) --> Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (Line Setting) --> Garageband.
The tone from my amp sounds good and completely to my liking. But the audio signal that is captured in Garageband sounds muffled and unclear. It requires a lot of EQ-ing in Garageband to get a half-decent tone.
I cannot understand why this is the case. Few reasons I can think of:
1) A 10 watt modeling amp is not really perfect for mic'ing up in the first place.
2) There is something wrong with the default Garageband setting when trying to record mic'ed amps.
Also, the cleaner tones record significantly better than over-driven tones.
If anyone has any experience with such a setup, please help!!
(2)2 Comments
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Don't plug a microphone into a Line input. There's more to Mic and Line inputs than attenuation.
Maybe the mic just won't take that sort of level. Turn the amp down or move the mic further away.
Look at the recorded waveform in Garageband. Does it resemble the Before or After picture? If the Before, you've got an audio signal 'hitting the buffers' somewhere!
Following comments, my initial suspicions seems to have been correct - the mic cannot handle the SPL.
Sound falls off logarithmically. at 2ft there is 'half' the level as at 1ft. [the 'half' depends on how you are measuring it, but will do as a rough guide for these purposes]
Without test gear you won't be able to measure actually how loud the amp is, nor how that relates to the mic's maximum SPL, but changing the distance is a simple practical test. Additionally, changing the angle of incidence will test where the speaker is brightest.
Moving it away a foot or two should clear up the sound.
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